Deborah Bloomfield

Something significant is happening to religious life across the US. In just a few decades, remarkably large numbers of people have been leaving organized religion. However, this exodus is not in favor of secular rationality, but rather the pursuit of spirituality that is more aligned with their personal values. The number of people who regard […]

YouTuber and science communicator Steve Mould, famed for his excellent and interesting demonstrations of physics and engineering (check out this life-sized pop pop boat, for example) has turned his attention to an old idea about treadmills. Rather than getting the result he had expected, he ended up feeling a little more empathy for flat-Earthers when […]

Behold: a live colossal squid in all its glory. After a century of searching, the extremely elusive cephalopod has been caught on camera alive in its natural habitat for the first time (and, for once, not inside the belly of a whale or washed up dead on a beach). The juvenile squid was filmed on […]

Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that fewer Americans than ever before now intend on having them. At least, that’s the finding from a new study out of Michigan State University: “We found that the percentage of nonparents who don’t want any children rose from 14 percent in 2002 to 29 percent in 2023,” said Jennifer […]

An unknown tribe of ancient hunter-gatherers that lived on the south Texas coast may have made music using modified human bones. After sifting through bone artifacts in a museum collection, the author of a new study identified a musical rasp fashioned from a humerus, resembling a macabre instrument called an omichicahuaztli that was used by […]

Sometimes, there are things we know, but we don’t know, you know? Like: when you play the lottery, getting the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 is technically just as likely as any other selection of six numbers – but somehow, we instinctively feel like that would just never happen. As it turns […]

An intriguing new study suggests that the universe may rotate once every 500 billion years. If correct, the authors believe that it could explain one of the most annoying puzzles in astronomic history: the Hubble tension. The Hubble tension, for the uninitiated, is that measurements of the expansion of the universe differ depending on how […]

Chicxulub, that pesky asteroid, really did a number on the dinosaurs. It wiped them off the Earth as it cleaned up around 76 percent of all species on the planet (apart from the birds, of course) – and yet while they died, the crocodylomorphs survived. That’s not the only mass extinction this animal group has […]

We may have visually led predators to thank for some of the most dazzling marine species: sea slugs. Luminous greens, blues, pinks, oranges, and even rainbow coloration are all on the cards when it comes to these gastropod mollusks (also known as nudibranchs). Often, it’s sending a very clear message: eat me and you’re going […]

If you are in the Southern Hemisphere, you can see the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) with your naked eye. It’s a dwarf galaxy satellite of the Milky Way looking fuzzy in the sky. What you wouldn’t know from looking at it, is that it’s being torn apart by another satellite, also visible to the naked […]

Cosmology these days is dominated by the search for things we are confident exist, but can’t find or explain: dark energy, dark matter, and “missing matter”. Now a large collaboration claims to have found the last of these. While the failure to find missing matter has not drawn anything like the resources or attention of […]

The ocean’s chatter is getting a high-tech translator. A new AI model is diving into the clicks, whistles, and pulses of dolphins, bringing scientists closer than ever to cracking the code of one of the animal kingdom’s most sophisticated forms of communication. Dubbed DolphinGemma, the new AI system is a dolphin-friendly large language model developed […]

The quest for longer, healthier lives has been a central concern for many throughout human history. People have strived to achieve this in many ways, whether practicing with a bow and arrow to avoid falling prey to predators in one swift strike or by analyzing our diets to ensure we eat the best foods.  In […]

Tourists and researchers on a whale-watching boat off the coast of Western Australia got a little more action than they bargained for when they witnessed a pygmy blue whale being hunted and eventually predated upon by a huge pod of orcas. Pygmy blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda) are a subspecies of the largest creature ever […]

“Cock-a-doodle-doo” at sunrise is heard around the world as nature’s alarm clock, but roosters don’t just do this morning ritual out of duty or tradition. As shown by several scientific studies, roosters crow at dawn to assert their dominance and signal their social status to others. Chickens are social animals with a surprisingly strict hierarchy […]

What do you get if you cross a rockhopper penguin with a macaroni penguin? According to National Geographic’s new series, Secrets Of The Penguins, you get a “rockaroni”. There’s been just a handful of documented sightings of these extremely rare hybrids to date, and they are one of several remarkable penguin spectacles captured in the […]

“Claiming that […] only humans can detect geometric regularity, is now falsified,” Andreas Nieder, a cognitive neurobiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told NPR. “Because we have at least the crow [also].” It’s a bold claim – no other non-human animal has ever been shown to possess this ability – but the evidence […]

It’s an often-repeated “fact”, and an oft-debunked “fact”, that Inuit languages have over 50 words for “snow”. But is there any truth to the idea that the language has more words than elsewhere to describe solid precipitation? And are there other concepts in other languages that have a similar excess of words? A new study […]

Computed tomography (CT) scans could soon account for 5 percent of all new cancer cases diagnosed annually if current practices persist, a new study has concluded. That sounds scary; but how serious is this risk, and what does it mean for the use of CT scans going forward? We take a look at the study […]

Here’s a sentence which, while technically correct, will make you sound like the most hardened of conspiracy theorists: no astronaut in history has ever left the Earth’s atmosphere. Yuri Gagarin, Neil Armstrong, Valentina Tereshkova, Katy Perry, William Shatner – name any astronaut, cosmonaut, or space tourist you like, and none of them have left the […]